I. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the combination of a highly visible marker and a fastener for readily attaching the marker to a supporting structure.
II. Description of the Prior Art
According to currently available statistics, each school year three hundred thirty thousand buses travel several billion miles while transporting millions of children to and from school. All this is accomplished with remarkable regularity and has resulted in an extremely good safety record. Nonetheless, each school year there are nearly one hundred school bus related deaths. The victims are usually between the ages of five and eleven. Some of the children are struck by their own school bus and others are injured by vehicles passing the bus while the bus in the "loading zone", that is, the area around the bus.
In the past, there has been no concerted effort to mark school bus stops or loading zones in the manner in which the stops for commercial bus routes are marked. One reason for this fact is that commercial routes are essentially limited to main thoroughfares and change little from year to year. In contrast, school bus routes necessarily follow the streets and roads of residential areas and can change drastically from year to year depending upon the student population. For example, when a group of students who have customarily used an elementary bus loading zone graduate to high school, they will often assemble at another location and at another time to await the high school bus. With this transition, there may be no elementary students remaining at the original loading zone, or so few that those remaining congregate at yet another location.
The choice of a school bus stop or loading zone location is often that of the students without regard to safety or route efficiency. This is not as it should be. Rather, the choice should be that of school administrators applying any necessary information available from parents and bus drivers. The locations should be chosen most importantly for safety, and also for maximum route efficiency considering the residential location of the students. Safety requires that a stop location be highly visible and, to the greatest extent possible, away from a region of heavy traffic.
Previously, flags, signs, pennants, and the like have been devised to be removably mounted on some kind of a supporting structure such as on an automobile antenna (U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,280,790 and 3,495,568), on the end of a dowel (U.S. Pat. No. 3,640,242), and on a post or tree trunk (U.S. Pat. No. 3,486,262). In the first three instances, very specific and individualized constructions are disclosed. In the latter instance, the sign is attached by a separate tie line cut to length, then tied around the post or tree trunk to each end of the sign.
Also known are one-piece strap fasteners of flexible material which have been devised as closures for containers as in the instance disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,470,173 and for securing bundles as in the instances disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,197,830, 3,731,347, and 3,735,449. Constructions in which a strap fastener is integral with a sign, flag, pennant or the like and used for mounting that article on a supporting structure are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,642,684, 2,846,796, 3,231,992, and 4,615,185. However, there are no instances known to the inventor in which a user has the ability to selectively choose the proper length of a pennant depending upon the size of a particular supporting structure and depending upon the length of the message to be displayed on the pennant.